Capra Con

After years of intending to see LADY FOR A DAY, I finally watched POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES, the generally-judged-inferior remake by the same director, Frank Capra. I will get around to the original, I promise!Angelo Rossitto, top left. You don’t often see him there.

Maybe I ought to have a Capra week so I can mop up late stuff like A HOLE IN THE HEAD and early stuff like the silents and then DIRIGIBLE and FLIGHT and then BROADWAY BILL which I turned off in disgust when Warner Baxter hit Clarence Muse? I find I have to be careful with Capra — up to a certain point, I find his work admirable, incredibly skilled, then I can sour on him because of his undoubted excesses or bum notes, and then I can reach the point where I’m no longer able to appreciate the brilliance because the less pleasant qualities are shining too luminously. This may be what happened to his biographer, Joseph McBride, who wrote an excellent book which does not make you think more highly of its subject.Pros and cons. Pros:

1. Lots of terrific character actors and comics, from Peter Falk, who brings the pre-code energy Ford tends to lack, to Edward Everett Horton, still magnificent, all the way down to little Angelo Rossitto. Arthur O’Connell plays a Spanish count, which seems bizarre on the face of it but he’s excellent in the role. Fernando Rey wouldn’t have been any better. And nice to see Thomas Mitchell again.
2. Bette Davis is good, though the story, which has been inflated from the original, allows her to drop out of sight for what feels like hours at a time.
3. Hope Lange is terrific.
4. “Introducing Ann-Margret.” Charmed, I’m sure. It’s a nothing role, but she had to get introduced somewheres, hadn’t she?
5. It looks really nice. The backlot throngs and feels alive. Randy Cook advised me to see this, pointing out how different it is from contemporaneous George Roy Hill period yarns that always look stark, clean and underpopulated. Museumlike.

Cons:

1. Bette is unable to wring tears from this material, maybe because she’s too strong? But Hope Lange steps in and manages it. Remember Capra’s uncharacteristically modest late-in-life observation, “I made a mistake about tragedy. I thought tragedy is when the actors cry. It isn’t. Tragedy is when the audience cries.” Oddly enough, he’s right in general but wrong about himself: Capra’s most teary scenes always have the audience joining the actors — but often it’s the tears of joy, as at the unendurably effective climax of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.
2. They’ve added what feels like half an hour onto the start of the story. It’s all good stuff, but it stretches a sentimental farce out to 136 minutes. That’s obviously too long. There’s a point where the plot kicks in and I thought, “I bet that’s the opening scene of LADY FOR A DAY.”
3. Glenn Ford, who was apparently such a dick as co-producer that Capra henceforth retired from features, is an effective lead, though with Ford I can see the talent but I usually wish I were watching someone else. Except in GILDA, where I think it kind of helps if you don’t much like Ford. You watch it rooting for Rita without knowing why. Anyway, Sinatra would have been better here.

Bette’s street person makeup is both good and bad. They’ve gone wild with the stippling, but it makes for an extreme effect that wins points for boldness. She’s once again wearing the big caterpillar eyebrows she sported in NOW VOYAGER. Fiona pointed out that older women LOSE their eyebrows. But I guess Bette is going for unkempt rather than aged.

For all the flaws, it’s not embarrassing, and it’s nice to see Capra going out with something large-scale, worthy of his skill in organizing group babble and spectacle. A shame he didn’t enjoy the experience more, but at least he wasn’t cut down to tiny, cheap stuff.

POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES stars Jubal Troop; Baby Jane Hudson; Mrs. Carolyn Muir; Parnell Emmett McCarthy; Columbo; Uncle Billy; Mr. Witherspoon; Hunk Houghton; Rip MacCool; Nick the barman; Ali Baba; Lady Booby; Lt. of Detectives Dundy; Carson Drew; Miles Archer; Xandros the Greek Slave; Grandma Walton; Lord Byron; Abe Vogel; Charlie Max; Sgt. Monk Menkowicz; Hannibal Hoops; Peter Pan; Mona Plash; Mrs. Laurel; BJ Pratt – Bill Collector; Arigeleno; and Cueball.

 

 

Giraffes on Fire

We decided to take a look at the Lone Wolf series because of comedy sidekick Eric Blore, and the ones of most interest were naturally those with Warren William, the starving lion, as the Lone Wolf himself, called Michael Lanyard in his daily life. Due to his habit of hanging round people’s necks, I presume. Anyway, having quite enjoyed films in The Saint and Perry Mason series, it seemed like a fresh set of programmers would be a nice thing to draw upon.

But due to sheer incompetence we ended up watching probably the only WW WOLF movie that DOESN’T have Eric Blore, THE LONE WOLF SPY HUNT. While Leonard Carey is a decent manservant type, one can’t help sighing as one imagines what a talent like Blore would make of his business. What reserves of lisping, seething and grimacing he could pour into it.

Still, this one has Ida Lupino, not yet a big star, and Rita Hayworth, not yet a bigger one. The same year she’d be coached through ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS by Howard Hawks and emerge with credit, as actors usually did under his tutelage, but here she’s talking in a strange, over-enunciated way, as if she’s been to the same teacher as Marilyn Monroe. It’s not just like Monroe, it’s like Monroe reciting her toothpaste commercial in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH.

Like most of these things, it starts amusingly and then chunters on way too long (71 minutes, in this case, is way too long) with most stuff played too slow and too under-rehearsed.

Still ~ surrealist party! With Ida Lupino as a flower-headed woman out of Dali. And another woman wearing a bird-cage on her head, anticipating Anais Nin in INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME. You can’t ask for your money back after that.

Adolphe McMenjou

Weird.

Adoplphe Menjou (attired as a Scotsman) to Fred Astaire in YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER: “At heart I’m a sentimentalist. I pity you but I love my daughter.”

Adolphe Menjou (attired as a Frenchman) to Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY: “You have spoiled the keenness of your mind by wallowing in sentimentality. […] You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.”

Be that as it may, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by comparing these films.

However, YWNL is a very enjoyable Astaire-Rita Hayworth musical, though light on music — it takes forever for Fred to dance, and we’re fifty minutes in before the first duet. The plot is fine, with just enough plausible deniability to prevent us concluding it’s about Menjou’s incestuous passion for his daughter, Rita (the biology is as unbelievable as the plotting), but it seems to take a long time to work through, with a few really good laughs along the way, admittedly.

Points are awarded for excellent use of Xavier Cugat, who gets to conduct, cartoon, and converse with far smoother integration than in the Esther Williams vehicles he pops up in (generally trying to palm off chihuahuas on Jimmy Durante, though my memory may be exaggerating the frequency of that transaction). And though I think Ginger was undeniably Fred’s best dancing partner in terms of chemistry, it is certainly arguable that Rita is the better dancer.

I can’t believe I snapped this frame grab at random and it came out so great ~